Christelle Sery & Jérôme Descamps - Te Ti’amā (2024)

Enigmatic and deeply emblematic, a sensitive dialogue unbound by predetermined roles, Te Ti’amā announces the opportune arrival of an exciting new duo defining an undocumented path in guitar-trombone dynamics.

While taking obvious inspiration from trailblazers ranging from Jim Hall and J.J. Johnson, Joe Pass and Bob Brookmeyer to, more recently, Marc Ducret and Samuel Blaser, this extraordinary debut by the French dyad of Christelle Séry and Jérôme Descamps thrusts a curious format into even bolder dominions. Primed by attentive listening, patience, congruent techniques and mutual understanding, Te Ti’amā (which, entirely appropriately, translates as ‘free’, or ‘freedom’) finds the pair instigating a phantasmal séance haunted by the convolutions of a myriad harmolodic ghosts.

Descamps billows in a bizarre syntax laced with languid moans, insectoid buzz and crepuscular flutter, his ‘bone occasionally wailing in the anguished cry of a wounded sea leviathan, before breaking into a series of doleful blues refrains, the emotive detritus of a New Orleans heartbreak, as Séry alternates between serrated nerve-janglers, finger-tapping bleed, seriously-phased volume-shift theory and some jolting bottleneck recalling Ry Cooder’s slide-heavy work on the Southern Comfort soundtrack.

Space operates throughout as a silent partner, with tones and timbres filtering down to shadow and suggestions of form. Moments of tranquil beauty teeter on broiling sabotage, imaging the dormant volcanic foundations of the idyllic island of Tahiti, where these sessions were recorded. On Te Ti’amā, Séry and Descamps have realised a remarkable nexus, a remote outpost of daring improvisation where squelched rasps, kookaburra whoops and wordless curses provide the surprise foundations for a dying star’s lingering shimmer.